Sapphire HD7870 Overclock Edition Review

Last week we reviewed the overclocked XFX HD7870 Black Edition graphics card, and today we look at the Sapphire HD7870 Overclock Edition. This card features a custom cooler, with twin fans and overclocked out of the box settings to appeal to the enthusiast audience.

Sapphire discrete video cards have scored well on Kitguru in recent months, and with good reason. Their coolers are the best on the market, even outperforming solutions from XFX. The combination of low noise levels and excellent cooling proficiency ensure class leading performance.

Product

AMD HD7970

AMD HD7950

Sapphire HD7870 Overclock Edition

AMD HD7850

Core Clock speed

925mhz

800mhz

1000mhz (1,050mhz)

860mhz

Transistors

4.31 billion

4.31 billion

2.8 billion

2.8 billion

Stream Processors

2,048

1,792

1,280

1,024

Compute Performance

3.79 TFLOPS

2.87 TFLOPS

2.56 TFLOPS

1.76 TFLOPS

Texture Units

128

112

80

64

Texture Fillrate

118.4 GT/s

89.6 GT/s

80 GT/s

55.0 GT/s

ROPs

32

32

32

32

Pixel Fillrate

29.6 GP/s

25.6 GP/s

32.0 GP/s

27.52 GP/s

Z/Stencil

128

128

128

128

Memory Type

3GB GDDR5

3GB GDDR5

2GB GDDR5

2GB GDDR5

Memory Clock

1,375mhz

1,250mhz

1,200mhz (1,250mhz)

1,200mhz

Memory Data Rate

5.5 GBps

5.0 Gbps

4.8 Gbps (5.0Gbps)

4.8 Gbps

Memory Bandwidth

264 GB/s

240 GB/s

153.6 GB/s

153.6 GB/s

Sapphire have opted for the same modest overclock as XFX – that being 50mhz on the core, from 1,200mhz to 1,250mhz. The GDDR5 memory also receives a 50mhz clock increase to 1,250mhz (5.0Gbps effective). The Gigabyte HD7870 Overclock Edition that we reviewed a short while ago received a 100mhz overclock to 1,100mhz on the core, but didn’t have a memory boost at all.